I’ll cover what I did on my first day, then what I did from day two to day five. Then I’ll cover the growth marketing audit and how we put it into action. Finally, I’ll share the lessons I learned.

On my first day, I focused on one thing: getting access. I sat in a room with the key stakeholders in this DTC ecommerce business. I made sure I got access to everything. Slow access to tools and marketing platforms delays results more than almost anything else. With larger clients, I have waited two or three weeks to get into Google Analytics and other key tools.

So if you’re a DTC founder bringing in an agency or a consultant, set up all their access from day one. In this case, I got access to Google Ads, Meta Ads, Google Analytics and all the external reporting platforms. I also got access to Search Console, and to both Google and Bing Merchant Center.

If you run an ecommerce store, make sure this access does not sit with your agency alone. I’ve seen many DTC founders who don’t have access to most of the tools I’ve listed. So ask yourself this. Do you have access to your Google Ads, your Meta Ads and your Google Analytics? Most importantly, do you have access to your Search Console?

Some founders don’t even know what Search Console is. We focus so much on performance marketing that we ignore it. Google Search Console tells you about the health of your website from Google’s point of view. Plenty of SEO tools will show you how your website performs. None of them gives you the truth the way Search Console does. As a DTC founder, you need to check it often.

If you run an ecommerce store, you also need to look at Google Merchant Center. It takes your product information and shows it to Google. If you run Google Shopping ads, your Merchant Center feed is what powers them. The same goes for Bing Merchant Center. Many businesses keep a close eye on Google Merchant Center, but they pay far less attention to Bing.

The next thing I got access to on day one was the heat map and session replay tool. This is a big part of how I helped add £250,000 per month in profit. I needed to understand how people behaved on the website.

Google Analytics tells you what happened. It shows which page people landed on and which channel sent them there. It doesn’t tell you why. A session replay tool records how customers move through your website. Many DTC stores have one, but they hardly ever look at it.

I used this tool to study visitor behaviour. I wanted to know how people came into the website and who they were. So I grouped the visitors I studied. I looked at first-time buyers. I looked at return buyers. I filtered for people on mobile and for people who came from organic search. It shows you how your customers move through your website.

I spent many days on this from the start. I looked at the problems on the website, what happened when people reached the cart and what they clicked on. This gives you rich detail on why an ecommerce store is not converting.

This tool is like a car. Everyone can drive a car, but some people are Formula One drivers. They are experts. The tool is good, but you still need someone who knows how to use it. The way I use a heat map and session replay tool will differ from how you use it as a founder. It will also differ from how your in-house marketing team uses it.

I also got access to the A/B testing tool on day one. There are many A/B testing platforms. Some are cheap and some are expensive. Some have AI features and some don’t. I spoke with the platform vendors too. When you use an A/B testing tool, talk to the vendor about the new features on the way. That keeps you on top of new ideas in the market. Finally, I got access to the email and SMS platforms.

So by the end of day one, I had access to everything I needed. Nothing was blocking me.

Day two was about understanding the customer. Many DTC founders make the same mistake. They want someone to come in and hand them solutions. Say you hire a consultant or an agency. If they offer solutions without asking about your customers, you have a problem. That person has an answer before they understand the problem.

Every business I’ve worked with is different. Every customer is different. Even on the same website, customers for each product behave differently. That’s why you need to understand your customer.

On my second day, I sat down and read the website end to end. This was one of the things that helped add £250,000 a month in profit. If you’re a DTC founder, ask yourself this. When did anyone in your team last read your website cover to cover? Has anyone ever done it?

As a founder, take the time to read your whole homepage and your product pages. You’ll be amazed at the problems you find. On many websites, I see product pages showing a 2.1 star review. You control your own website. You can remove that review. If someone lands on that page from a paid ad and sees a 2.1 star review, nothing else you say will make them buy. I see this a lot. So read your whole website as often as you can. It’s what makes you money. Why wouldn’t you read it?

Next, I spoke with the internal stakeholders and the back office team to find the best sellers. Many businesses spend heavily on products that bring in few sales. Each product on your website has its own cost per acquisition. The problem is that we group everything together. So from day two to day five, I found the best selling products and the products with very low sales.

Then I met with the fulfilment team and the customer service team. I wanted to learn about the problems with the products and how things had changed over the years. Working with DTC ecommerce brands over many years has taught me something. Not all the information you need is on the website. Not all of it sits with the CEO or the founder. And no one person in the business has it all. So I needed to talk to people across the business to find the hidden pockets of knowledge. I learned a lot from the fulfilment and customer service teams.

Then I studied the competitors. There were different types of competitor. I made sure I understood their prices, their positioning and their products. I looked at how their products appealed to customers. I compared them with my client’s products.

I also used AI to gather a large number of reviews. AI is useful when you want to understand customer behaviour outside your client’s website. But AI only shows you the patterns. It can’t always pick up the emotion. So you need to take the time to read those third-party reviews yourself. We know some people fake reviews. Some competitors even post negative reviews about you on third-party review sites. But there is still a treasure trove of insight into how customers feel.

All this work showed me three things. It showed me which best sellers I needed to convert better. It showed me which weak sellers I needed to understand. And it showed me how customers behaved. I learned what people complained about on review sites and read between the lines. I saw what the competitors did really well and what customers disliked about them. So I didn’t just analyse my client’s reviews. I analysed reviews for every company in the category.

The next step was the audit. An audit is about finding quick wins. First, I used Google Analytics to find every high-traffic landing page on the website. The homepage was one of the busiest pages. The sales page was another. Some product listing pages also had very high traffic. I added every page that received campaign traffic in the last 12 months.

I wanted to understand what the conversion rates of those pages were really telling us. I quickly saw that some pages had conversion rates of up to 15%. The conversion rate also changed with the seasons. When I dug deeper, I found other pages converting at less than 1%. So some pages converted at 12%, 13% or 15%. Others converted at 0.5%.

That showed me that not every page on the website is built equally. Not every page gets the same quality of traffic. Some pages got more paid traffic. Others got more organic traffic. These conversion rates showed me where the money was leaking.

I also analysed the revenue from each landing page over the last three, six and 12 months. That gave me a clear picture of which pages to fix for the biggest revenue gain. I also looked at the average order value for each landing page.

I went further with the conversion analysis. I looked at how people behaved on these pages on each day of the week. I tracked how conversion rates changed across the week. These pages bring traffic into the website. So I then looked at how each page fed into the rest of the funnel.

I see the same pattern everywhere. In ecommerce, the biggest drop-off is almost always the product page. Next comes the cart page, then sometimes the checkout. This helped me narrow down where I could find quick wins and grow profit.

On those pages, I also checked the share of new visitors and returning customers. I checked the average order value for each group. Then I broke down the conversion rate of each high-traffic page by channel. I did this in Google Analytics.

I can use Google Analytics this way not because I’m special. It’s because I used to be a Google Analytics certified expert. That training helps you understand what is working and what isn’t.

The session replays also showed me that the mobile navigation and site structure were weak. I found quick wins there too, and we used them to improve the website as a whole.

The audit also showed problems with the branding. I’ve seen many websites in my career, and I see the same problem every time. Brand marketing and performance marketing don’t work together. Brand marketing has drifted so far from performance marketing that few people value both. So with every client, I see the same thing. Founders often ignore brand because they don’t know how to link it to their ads. That was another finding from the audit.

I also found technical problems on the website. And the website was getting very little visibility in AI search. The audit revealed all of this.

The next step was putting it into action. First, I presented my findings to every team I worked with. That meant the stakeholders, the email team, the web team and the acquisition team. I showed them the problems on the homepage, the product pages, the cart page and the category pages. I showed them the big gap between the brand strategy and the performance marketing. I showed them the problems in Meta Ads, Google Ads and the organic channels. The aim was to explain the problems and the quick wins we could act on straight away. The email journey was also disconnected. The business had no dedicated email landing page.

This was in late 2025. The client is a big brand, and it has made real waves in the last 12 months.

I start the same way with every client. I work on the paid channels first and cut all the waste. This is where we got the most value. I’ve worked with clients where waste was burning 40% to 50% of their profit. That’s why I always start here. Google Ads, Meta Ads and even TikTok audits are where I always get the best results.

I completely rebuilt the Google Ads account. I added negative keywords to cut out the searches that wasted money, and I fixed the targeting. Some people clicking the ads were not ready to buy yet. I filtered every one of them out. More than 50% of the money we saved from paid waste went straight to profit.

Then I put strategies on the website that trigger the emotions that make people buy, and buy again.

I work hands-on with paid search. In agencies and in-house teams alike, paid search often gets handed to junior staff. They don’t always understand the psychology of online sales. They don’t know how to use words to trigger buying emotions. So I rolled up my sleeves and focused on improving the paid channel.

I also worked on the landing pages. The website was going through a redesign. It had new navigation and new categories, and there was a new product launch. We had no time to A/B test these changes, so we built them into the new website as it went live. I worked closely with the web team to get every new landing page right. I also worked closely with the UX team.

This was a global business. I focused on the UK market, so I worked with teams in other regions. I took lessons from the German market and others and used them to improve the UX of the website. That work played a big part in the profit growth.

After that, I A/B tested many high-value landing pages. Some saw conversion uplifts of up to 7%. Together, this work added £250,000 in extra profit per month for this client.

If you’re a DTC founder and you want me to walk you through this process for your business, this isn’t me just saying what I can do. If you’ve listened to this episode, you’ve seen that there is a process and a system. There are parts I didn’t cover today, and I can help you put them in place.

My name is Femi Olajiga. I help DTC ecommerce founders cut customer acquisition cost by 25% while growing profit by 20%. I do it by cutting waste, then scaling the paid ads that make money and bring in high-converting customers.

Book a 30-minute session with me https://calendly.com/femi-olajiga/new-meeting. I’ll walk you through the full growth marketing audit process I used to help this client add £250,000 a month in profit.

DTC founders are bringing growth marketing in-house to cut customer acquisition cost (CAC) and protect profit margins. Bringing your growth marketing team in-house is the fastest route to reducing CAC and increasing your profit margin. By default, agency fees increase with your paid ads spend. Having your own in-house growth marketing team with a fractional growth marketing consultant training and developing in-house skills and capability is the best route to reducing CAC long-term.

I have spent 16 years in growth marketing, with luxury ecommerce and in-store brands, as well as small DTC ecommerce brands. I also run my own Shopify ecommerce store. The patterns I experience is the same across 600k-page ecommerce websites and a 40-page DTC ecommerce founder led website. Founders can easily get blindsided by the increase in revenue, but behind the scenes, customer acquisition often eats heavily into profit margins. This then results in an increase in revenue which does not have any correlation with an increase in profit margins. There are a few factors to consider when trying to reduce your CAC and increase profit margins.

If you want one plan that ties every channel to profit, see how I build a DTC growth marketing strategy.

Agencies focus on marketing metrics like CPA and ROAS

In my experience most agencies report on less important metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS), reach, cost per click, cost per lead and cost per acquisition. Whilst these are important metrics to track campaign effectiveness, i.e. they show that the ads are working. They do not immediately connect to important commercial metrics, meaning they do not show that the business is making money from these campaigns or how much.

As a founder, you need to focus on two key commercial metrics:

1. Customer acquisition cost (CAC): what you pay to win any customer, and
2. New customer acquisition cost (nCAC): what you pay to win a new customer who has never bought from you before.

The gap between how much you spend on existing customers and new customers directly impacts your cost and profit margins. If your paid ads keep paying for existing customers who should normally come to you via organic traffic and email automation, that increases your overall cost. As a founder, I recommend structuring your growth marketing strategy on increasing the number of new customers acquired and redirecting spend on existing customers towards new customers to reduce waste and lower your overall CAC. As a founder, I want you to ask yourself one question: are your marketing analytics dashboards tracking nCAC and CAC?

Why is your CAC and nCAC always increasing?

Some things will be out of your control, while other things you are able to influence within the next one week. Paid ad platforms, like Google and Meta, are publicly traded companies that need to increase shareholder value in the form of dividend payments: one of the ways they do this is by increasing ads cost. WordStream studied 16,446 US search campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025 and discovered that the average cost per click rose by 12.88% in this period, with 87% of industries paying more. In my experience of reducing CAC for my clients, the following reasons sit behind every increase in the cost of customer acquisition:

1. Broad campaign targeting. Agencies assign less experienced executives to manage Ggoogle Ads accounts. Due to a general lack of experience and understanding of important commercial metrics, these individuals chase after traffic volume as opposed to quality acquisition. Volume looks good in a report, but if the traffic converts at a very low rate this will invariably increase your cost.
2. Paying for customers you already have. I recently audited a Google Ads campaign that was structured to acquire existing customer. These customers were funneled through branded Google Ads campaigns, which meant they clicked on Google Ads when they searched for my client’s website rather than clicking on the organic ads. I restructured the entire ad campaign and eliminated the wasted spend which created a £3,000 increase in daily profit for the DTC client. I also identified that the previous agency set up Bing ads pointing traffic to the homepage for product specific campaigns and this account was bleeding £400 per day. This wastage was ongoing for many months because nobody remembered to check and actively monitor the campaign. I switched off this leak, and this added extra £400 per day to the profit margin. Small step – big win.
3. Another reason why your CAC is increasing is due to agency obsession with putting inexperienced, junior account executives in charge of large accounts. Agencies pitch to clients with senior staff, whilst junior staff often run the account operationally. The worst case I have seen was a graduate with less than a year of work experience running several accounts, one of which spent about £120,000 a month. Don’t get me wrong – everybody needs to start somewhere, and there is nothing inherently wrong with junior agency staff learning on the job. The problem is that senior oversight of this work is often lacking rigour and consistency – this is something you should be looking out for as a client, to ensure your financial investment in this work is appropriately safeguarded.
4. Targeting cheap customers via inexpensive ad platforms. Some teams buy the cheapest clicks they can find and hope some convert. Cheap customers rarely stay, so you keep having to pay to replace them with new customers. At some point (at least theoretically) the well will run dry.
5. Some competitors have bigger budgets, and they can easily bid on your brand terms to steal your existing customers – the ones that type your brand terms into their search. This invariably increases your customer acquisition cost compared to competitors.

A profit led paid ads audit finds this waste in a DTC account.

Agency fees and retainers are variable costs

Most agencies charge retainers plus a percentage of your paid ad spend, which means your agency fees will inevitably increase as you scale paid ads and spend more. The same applies to your CRO, Email, TikTok and Meta ads agency fees.

The opposite happens with in-house growth marketing teams with fixed cost salaries. Your fixed cost salaries only increase with bonuses you approve, and these are usually linked to revenue and profit increases of your business. To get a bonus, each one of your team have to ensure they are hitting their targets. A fractional growth marketing consultant also works on a fixed fee. This is why so many founders are moving their growth marketing in-house with the support of fractional growth marking consultants like Femi Olajiga.

Accepting that paid ads are a rented channel

Most founders focus on performance marketing and heavily tilt towards Google and Meta ads, whilst at the same time neglecting organic channels and brand marketing. This inevitably increases customer acquisition costs in the long run.

As a founder, I recommend working with your team to understand your CAC and nCAC by marketing channel. Once you fully understand these costs you can structure your budget and marketing activities to focus on the most effective and efficient marketing channels from a profitability and LTV perspective. In my experience, organic channels are the best customer acquisition channels from a repeat purchase and overall profitability standpoint. Some paid channels are notorious with acquiring price sensitive and impulsive shoppers who often shop once and never return to purchase from you again. These customers never reach the lifetime value (LTV) or lifetime gross profit (LTGP) you need to make your marketing profitable.

Post-click impacts on your CAC and nCAC

Founders often ignore the post click experience that happens on websites, or they feel A/B testing is the best way to optimise post click journeys. I have seen CRO agencies who operate without a complete understanding of how platforms like Google, Bing and Meta ads work. This creates a misalignment between acquisition channels and landing page experiences.  As a founder, I recommend checking the conversion and exits rates of the following:

1. Your paid ads landing pages.
2. Your homepage.
3. Your product pages.
4. Your sales pages, listicles and advertorials.
5. Your blog.

Compare them. The weakest pages with the most paid traffic are where you need to test first.

Next, check your product images, your reviews and your trust signals. Then look at your value proposition and offers. I trained with MECLABS in 2012 on value proposition. This lesson has held up ever since: the strength of your offer has a direct effect on both CAC and nCAC.

Then check that each ad matches the page it sends people to. If your Meta ads, Google ads and organic traffic all land on the same page, this makes it impossible to align the landing page with acquisition channel intent. Also, check your abandoned cart and abandoned checkout emails. Many brands I have audited had none. When a shopper leaves your checkout, they often search again and buy from a rival. You paid for that visit. Your rival did not. Their CAC falls as yours rises.

Customer retention is the cheapest way to cut CAC and increase profit margins

The best way to lower CAC is to keep the customers you win. Aim for each new customer to buy from you three to four times in the next 12 months. Here is where to start:

1. Teach new buyers how to use what they bought: most post-purchase emails stop at thank you.
2. Use those emails to suggest the next right product, an upgrade or a subscription.
3. Set up your ads and email so part of the plan serves existing customers, but do not overspend on people who will return anyway.
4. Run win back campaigns for customers who have lapsed.
5. Reward referrals and test loyalty schemes and subscriptions. Referrals give you a cheaper route to new customers.

What bringing growth marketing in house looks like

Here is how I normally work with founders:

I join on a fixed fee for three to six months; I audit the accounts, find the quick wins and put them live.

I set up the campaigns and the tracking, then I train your team to run them.

If you want a longer retainer, it still costs less than an agency.

For one DTC brand, this cut CAC by 50%. It added as much as £3,000 a day in profit on top of what the company was already making.

The work covers more than paid ads. It links your marketing numbers to your commercial goals: CAC, nCAC, LTV and LTGP. Agencies often report on marketing metrics alone, and that gap is where profit leaks, never to be seen again.

Five questions to ask your agency this month

1. What is our CAC and our nCAC, by channel?
2. How much of our spend goes on customers who already buy from us?
3. Who runs our account each day, and how many years of experience do they have?
4. What is the conversion rate of each landing page that gets paid traffic?
5. What happens by email after someone abandons a cart, and after someone buys?

If your agency cannot answer these, you have a margin problem, not an ads problem.

The next step

Rising ad prices are out of your control. Waste, weak pages and poor retention are not. Bringing growth marketing in-house puts those levers back in your hands. It also turns a variable cost into a fixed one. I work with founders in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Book a 30-minute call with me and we will go through your data to identify where your CAC is leaking. You can then take the plan and run with it yourself, or we can work together over the medium to long term to make sure every pound or dollar you spend on your marketing is generating the absolute maximum return in your profit margin. The choice is yours. Book a 30-minutes Growth Marketing call with me: https://calendly.com/femi-olajiga/new-meeting

There is a general perception that it’s better to hire an external agency to work on your SEO as opposed to building an in-house SEO team. This assumption is far from the truth and in this article I will explain how and why it is better to build and structure your in-house SEO team. Let’s start with the top level explanations of the meaning of in-house SEO team.

What is an in-house SEO Team?

An in-house SEO team is a scenario where you hire full-time SEO professionals to work exclusively on your website alone. Your in-house SEO team has limited to no interaction or dependencies on external SEO agencies. This, of course, very much depends on the level of SEO maturity of your website. The concept of in-house SEO team(s) also applies to SEO agencies because they, too, can decide to in-source their end-to-end SEO capability in-house. So why would an organisation opt to hire an in-house SEO team as opposed to delegating its SEO strategy planning to an external SEO agency? This leads us nicely to the next question.

What are the benefits of having an in-house SEO team?

I have had the opportunity to work as part of in-house SEO teams both on the client and on the agency side, which has given me a wealth of experience. There are a few benefits of hiring an in-house SEO team:

1. Security: Having an in-house SEO team reduces the risk of falling into the trap of bad SEO being done to your website which might result in Google punishing your website for ‘black hat’ SEO. This is because some agencies are only interested in quick wins, without considering that these might have a long term negative impact on your website. This is why I always recommend building your SEO team in-house, as this gives you complete control over your SEO activities. 
2. Internal Communication: One of the main problems of implementing SEO in companies is due to the fractured communication between external agencies and important internal stakeholders like the IT development team. It is extremely easy for in-house SEO team members to just walk up to IT dev team members and collaborate towards implementing technical SEO tasks. It’s even easier for internal SEO team members to request access to internal data which cannot be shared with external SEO agencies. 
3. Reduced Cost: I have worked with large marketing agencies that charge clients anything from $800 to $1500 per day depending on the size of the website. There is a perception that external agencies are expensive because they have expertise that in-house SEO teams don’t have. There is a different side to this assumption, because an in-house SEO team can easily hire someone with agency background. Business leaders often make the mistake of believing that hiring an SEO agency will give them access to SEO tools but in actual fact, in-house teams can buy these SEO tools themselves, and often at a cheaper rate, directly from vendors. The cost of SEO tools should not be the main factor driving your decision on whether or not to outsource your SEO to an agency. 
4. SEO Implementation Speed: The ease of collaboration with important internal stakeholders makes SEO implementation a lot faster for in-house SEO teams. I have seen situations where the implementation of SEO recommendations from external teams is delayed by up to 6 months (?!) due to fractured communication with external SEO agencies. It is also possible to have multiple agencies working on your SEO which makes it difficult to track prioritisation of SEO tasks and further complicates the communication and the execution of your SEO strategy. In-house SEO teams can easily nudge internal stakeholders to speed up SEO task implementation. 

There are pros and cons to the cost benefits of in-house SEO team structure and the next question to consider when structuring your in-house SEO team is:

How much does it cost to build an in-house SEO team?

Whether in-house or agency side, every SEO team needs SEO software for technical SEO, content production and link building. It is significantly cheaper to buy your own in-house SEO tools because you will basically be buying the same tools agencies use, for which they will often charge a premium. There are situations where agencies ‘white label’ SEO tools and resell the same tools to clients as “proprietary SEO tools”. The cost of SEO tools ranges from $600 to $800 per month depending on the size of your website, but you can easily find cheaper tools for $200 per month if you have a very small website. 

Next you need to consider how much it would cost to hire an in-house SEO team. You will ideally need between two to 20 people on your in-house SEO team, depending on the size of your website and the competitiveness of your industry. For startups I recommend hiring a T-shaped SEO consultant like myself, as opposed to building an in-house SEO team. This is a more cost effective approach that saves time and money because it costs around $120,000 to hire an in-house team with all the skills required but you can easily pay half of that to a consultant and still get better results than hiring an agency. Most organisations do not fully in-house their SEO but adopt a hybrid model that offers the best of both worlds. 

Skills you need for when structuring an in-house SEO team

There is the perception that you get more skilled SEO if you decide to outsource your SEO to an SEO agency but people often fail to realise that some of the best SEO teams work in-house. It’s also easy to build an in-house SEO team by hiring people with agency backgrounds. Having said that, you will need to ensure that the people you hire have a mix of the following SEO skills:

• Technical SEO
• Content Production
• Digital PR
• Link Building

How do you structure a successful in-house SEO team?

Usually this function is driven by a Head of SEO or SEO Director and I recommend hiring a seasoned, T-shaped SEO professional with experience of technical, content and link building. This will ensure that every aspect of SEO is covered. Reporting into the Head of SEO are 3 broad skillset groups lead by the:

• SEO Manager (Technical SEO)
• SEO Manager (Content)
• SEO Manager (Link building / Digital PR)

This can then be further extended with the executive/assistant/intern layers, if necessary, as shown in the image.

Different types of in-house SEO teams

There are two options of in-house SEO team structure which are:

• Fully in-house SEO team
• Hybrid in-house SEO team.

Hybrid in-house SEO team is a structure that works well for most small to medium-sized organisations. It’s often difficult to in-house all of your SEO team, which is why most organisations hire SEO consultants on an ad hoc basis to help create a detailed SEO strategy and implementation roadmap. 

I work with companies to save them the cost of hiring expensive in-house SEO team due to my experience across Technical SEO, content, link building and conversion optimisation. If you’d like to discuss your requirements further – please get in touch via email on femi@cxconversion.com or call me on +44 (0)75 6809 1722.

As a business owner or marketing leader, it’s important to understand that digital marketing channels can be grouped into two fundamental categories:

1.     Short-term focused digital marketing channels
2.     Long-term focused digital marketing channels

These are then further subdivided into paid advertising and free organic digital marketing channels. Irrespective of which digital marketing channel(s) you decide to invest in, you need to clarify with your marketing team or agency whether these channels are short term or long term because this will help you understand how much is being wasted on marketing.  

Free Digital Marketing Channels

Digital marketing channels classed as ‘free’ are not actually free, because you still need to invest in hiring the right staff to manage these channels, as well as investing in marketing software tools. The results you get from ‘free’ digital marketing channels are more long-term focused and require patience because it takes time to get traction and ROI on investment in these marketing channels.

Paid Digital Marketing Channels

Paid digital marketing channels will get you instant results from a traffic acquisition perspective but ROI is not guaranteed unless you are targeting the right customer using the right keyword terms. I have seen companies spend as much as £5 million pounds on paid advertising without getting any tangible results because they lacked a focused marketing plan and clear KPIs.

Types of Digital Marketing Channels

The primary purpose of digital marketing channels is to get traffic to your website or encourage customers to visit branches of your physical store locations to buy or pick-up orders. Digital marketing channels come in different shapes and sizes. Here are some of the important strategies and digital marketing channels from a traffic acquisition, retention and conversion perspective:

1.     Content Marketing (production and distribution)
2.     Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others)
3.     Search Engines (Google Ads, Display Advertising and Search Engine Optimisation – SEO)
4.     Email Marketing
5.     Affiliate Marketing
6.     Offline Marketing
7.     Brand Equity (Direct Traffic)

The foundation of getting traffic from digital channels is content production but you see a lot of marketing ‘gurus’ classifying content marketing as a marketing channel. However, content production is actually the foundation of all your digital marketing channels from an acquisition, conversion and retention standpoint. The effectiveness of your marketing strategy depends on the quality, consistency, targeting and distribution of your content across and tailored to digital marketing channels. I will explain this further in the next sections of the article.

Social Media as a Digital Marketing Channel

You can acquire website traffic and build brand awareness from the following social media channels:

1.   Facebook
2.   YouTube
3.   Twitter
4.   LinkedIn
5.   Instagram
6.   Snapchat
7.   Pinterest
8.   Reddit
9.   WeChat
10.  TikTok
11.  Medium
12.  Twitch
13.  WhatsApp
14.  Quora
15.  Meetup
16.  Flickr
17.  Vimeo

You can achieve your customer acquisition, engagement and conversion objectives using different social media platforms but it’s important to understand your customers’ behaviours on these platforms in order to avoid wasting your marketing budget. Business executives often complain that “we tried Facebook and Twitter but didn’t get any conversion”.

On the other extreme you see successful ecommerce businesses making huge profit from using social media platforms. You need to understand your customers and how to connect with them on social media if you want to increase business results using social media platforms.

Some social media platforms like LinkedIn will bring customers to your website that are more business-oriented, while platforms like Facebook will generate less B2B oriented traffic. Whatever your business venture, you want to identify the best social media platforms that align with your target customer, business objectives because that’s the channel that will generate high converting customers.

Search Engines

Another important digital marketing channel is the search engine which is unarguably the highest source of traffic to your website. Google search is the most effective engine and the platform also owns YouTube, which is the second largest global search engine. Listed below are some of the most popular search engines:

1.     Google
2.     Bing
3.     Yahoo
4.     Baidu
5.     AOL
6.     Ask.com
7.     DuckDuckGo
8.     Yandex

As a digital marketing channel, search engines send traffic to your website in two fundamental ways:

•       Paid search traffic also known as Google Ads
•       Organic search traffic which you can manage through SEO or search engine optimisation. 

Paid search is when you pay search engines like Google to get customers to your website. This is a pay-as-you-go approach because you will only get what you pay for and Google will stop sending traffic to your website if you are not able to afford that traffic. The same applies to YouTube, you can invariably pay to get traffic from YouTube videos to your website.

Paid search as a digital marketing channel is very expensive but also very effective if you have the budget for it. Make sure you are targeting the right keywords and also that you are sending the traffic to the correct landing pages. 

SEO is another effective and cost-efficient digital marketing channel that is important if you are keen on reducing your customer cost per acquisition. To get traffic to your website from search engines without spending a lot of money on Google ads, you need to create very good content which will get picked up by those search engines and then be shown to your target customer. This is how you get free traffic to your website through SEO.

Affiliate Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel 

Affiliate marketing is just someone else doing your marketing for you, but you pay them a commission if you make a sale. So it’s basically getting other people to create content or do whatever they can to push traffic to your website, but you then have a tracking code that whenever the traffic they send to your website converts into a sale, you pay them a commission – a percentage of the sale. That’s affiliate marketing.

Email Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel

Another digital marketing channel is email marketing, which is very, very effective for customer retention. Although you can use email marketing for customer acquisition, you will want to focus your email marketing on retaining your existing customers by engaging them with content.

Email marketing is very unique because when people go on social media platforms, Google search, or whatever, they’re presented with different options. But with email marketing, you can really target your customer. It’s a form of one-to-one conversation, so there’s less distraction. That’s what makes email marketing very, very effective to retain existing customer and bring down your customer acquisition costs.

Offline Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel

Another important marketing channel that you should consider embedding in your marketing strategy is offline marketing. You can embed and include in your offline marketing materials your website address, your email and details of other online channels you are using, which can bring people back to your website. 

You should consider various combinations of these channels when you’re looking to start utilising and optimising your digital marketing to get the best result.

There is no one best channel, but the decision on the mix of channels you will be using will likely make or break your business. If you choose the wrong mix of channels, you’re bound to waste your marketing budget. But if you choose the right channel mix that aligns with your target customer, then you’re bound to make more money and ensure the long-term sustainability of your business.